Vestnik Kavkaza
The Hollywood actor Pierce Brosnan has arrived in Moscow for the premiere of his new film, The November Man. The Russian audience knows him as the 007 agent James Bond. The filming of the 19th film of the adventures of James Bond The World Is Not Enough (the third movie with Brosnan) took place also in Azerbaijan. "Vestnik Kavkaza" asked Pierce Brosnan about his impressions of Azerbaijan, which are still fresh in his memory despite the fact that the filming took place in 1999.
"I remember waking up on Monday morning, saying goodbye to my wife and going to Azerbaijan. We received a very warm welcome in Azerbaijan. It was a very unusual experience, to be honest with you. We travelled frantically on roads, saw oil rigs and refineries everywhere. There was a very unusual landscape, but it was very appropriate for the film," Brosnan said. He also recalled "very pleasant dinners in the company of very nice people" and said that he "returned home, overloaded with caviar."
Just like all the movies about James Bond, the movie got mixed reviews. It has been criticized for many Soviet topoi, including constant smuggling of nuclear warheads on the territory of post-Soviet republics with an aim to subjugate the entire world. However, it was with the help of this movie that the world discovered Azerbaijan. The movie has advertised the country in a great way.
The scene where James Bond first appears in Azerbaijan was shot in the village of Bibiheybat where the Bibiheybat Mosque is located. The mosque was completely destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1936, but reconstructed in the late 1990s. It is now considered one of the most significant monuments of Islamic architecture in Azerbaijan. There is an oil and gas field in the Bibiheybat, where the world's first oil well was made with the help of wooden rods in mid-19th century. It was also there that the first oil rig in the USSR was drilled.
It is believed that the pipeline aimed at delivering the Caspian oil to the West which features in the movie was based on the Baku -Tbilisi - Ceyhan pipeline. This pipeline is currently used to deliver oil from the Azeri-Chirag and Shah Deniz fields to the rest of the world. In addition, this pipeline is used to supply oil from Turkmenistan. The supply of oil from the Kazakh deposit Tengiz was partially restored in October 2013.
